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The Newspaper Isn't Dead Yet
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo had high hopes for using the Kindle DX — Amazon's new large-screen e-reader — to read newspapers. A good first effort, says Manjoo, who concludes that for now newsprint still beats the $489 Kindle. While he has issues with latency, what he really misses relates to graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list, leaving a reader to guess which pieces are most important to read. Newspapers, by contrast, opine on the importance of the day's news using easy-to-understand design conventions — important stories appear on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. Also, because of its overnight delivery model, Manjoo gripes that the Kindle suffers from a lack of timeliness, making it not even as good as a smartphone."
But didn't Cory Doctorow just tell us that these "gatekeepers" are just getting in everyone's way?!? Clearly this guy from Slate is just horribly misguided and doesn't understand the world around him.
The newspaper is so dead, see? *points at the newspaper*
Why not just wait until you get to the office and then browse the world's newspapers with google news?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"leaving a reader to guess which pieces are most important to read."
Yeah, I hate that. Much better if the editor tells us what is important. Like, it's not as if I'll have a different opinion or anything.
News, schmooze. It's all the same at the end fo the day isn't it. Man bites dog; Judge in gay love nest horror plot; prime minister justifies war with humongous lie blah blah. I really need the editor to let me know what is important.
Lining my parrot's cage with Kindles would get expensive.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
In the old "print" days of newspapers, this was not a problem-- there would be only a few newspapers in a town; and the customers were given the choice of buying a newspaper or not reading the news. With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost.
The only real solution is for newspapers to continue to go out of business. When this reaches the point where there are only a handful left, they might be able to start a model of restricting access to paid customers. They're still competing against bloggers and crowdsourcing, of course, but the actual professional (which is to say, paid) reporter model of newsgathering may have advantages in the quality of news, sufficient that it may be worth it for some customers to pay for.
(This is a general problem in free market theory, by the way, not specific to newspapers-- in a market with many small producers (rather than one or two large ones), when the marginal cost of production is close to zero, the equilibrium free market cost is zero, and thus everybody is driven out of business...)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"The Kindle presents news as a list, leaving a reader to guess which pieces are most important to read." Leaving the read to guess or leaving the reader to decide which article is more important? Part of the reason newspapers are in trouble is because they tell they reader what they think is important. Anyway, it's still a list of articles by section. Just put the "important" ones at the top, so us morons will know what's important.
Sorry about the mess.
They need help getting lead out of the woods. They got lost when all this "new" technology started appearing.... about the end of last century...
How could they not have figured out by now how to deliver their content to readers electronically using micro payments or subscriptions...
No you don't need a kindle to read an electronic document ffs. Shouldn't our cellphones suffice? We can charge the micro transaction with "minutes" by sending SMS. Get a SMS back with a code we can enter on their website from any computer to view the article. Or have it email delivered to an email capable headset.
Get the ball rolling on something, or you will die and it will be your own fault. This is no time to be deer in headlights.
Some information for informed discussion:
I rather like my newspaper on the Kindle, just for the fact of the small size and not having to crawl under the car to retrieve the paper. In addition, articles are in one piece, not continued on page A28. The articles are not abridged. The rest comes down to the individual paper and their publishing habits, and how much effort they're putting into the Kindle edition.
I get the Washington Post on my Kindle. It never has more than one picture per article, and sometimes when there are multiple pictures in the print edition, the wrong caption is attached to the picture in the Kindle edition. There are no ads, classified, comics, crosswords, sudokus, or horoscopes. All of the local sections and once-a-week sections are included. It is delivered every morning while I stand on the metro platform. The download takes about 30 seconds. Make sure to get it on the platform- Sprint doesn't have towers in the tunnels in DC.
There are separate sections for "The Front Page" "Politics & Nation" "World" and "The Fed Page," which I believe (not sure) are all rolled into the A section in the print edition.
You can clip a whole article with two clicks, which copies the whole article into a text file that can later be moved to a computer.
Periodicals are automatically deleted when they are more than seven issues old. You can flag any particular issue to be saved, and it will not delete it, although once seven issues have passed (a week for newspapers, seven months for magazines), you will no longer be able to re-download that issue from Amazon, although if you have stored it on your computer, you can always re-load it by USB. This is a demand on the newspapers part, as they make good money selling back articles. It's also largely moot, as most people throw away their newspaper when they're done reading it anyways.
The Kindle newspapers are no less timely than print newspapers, as they ARE the print paper in content. For breaking news, there's the NYTimes Breaking News Blog, which I don't subscribe to, and Google News open on my browser during the day at work.
The Washington Post has made huge leaps over the past year and a half on their Kindle edition. Every couple months I notice something in the layout has changed, and always for the better. When they made that big deal about the Business section being rolled into the A section, it has remained separate for Kindle users- the change was made to save on printing costs, after all.
I read my news on the Kindle 2. The Kindle 1 has a different set of behaviors (never automatically deleted old newspapers, leading to memory filling up, no joystick for easy navigation). The DX is just a Kindle 2 with a larger screen and (reportedly poor) native PDF support, so newspapers should not be any different than on the K2.
It's REALLY EASY to go get a single issue of a different paper, if you want one that day. Today I want to read the LA Times and see what's happening in my parent's area? It's kinda hard to find newsstands selling the LA times in DC, but I can do it easily on the Kindle.
No periodical that I know of has TTS disabled, although it's a terrible idea. The TTS software is terrible with proper names.
The main issue with newspapers on the Kindle stems from- what else?- DRM. A normal book purchase for a Kindle is available on all devices associated with that account (up to 6). A periodical subscription is tied to one device only. That means if you have His and Her Kindles, then you'll need two subscriptions for both devices to get the same paper. Also, this means that if you are backing up back issues on your computer and your Kindle breaks and is replaced, you will lose access to those back issues, unless you break the DRM. Switching which Kindle a periodical is assigned to is easy, but if you change your settings twice a day every day, you are likely to attract attention. Periodicals can only be assigned to Kindles, not to iPhones/iPod touches, although iPhones have their own methods of newspaper-getting.
Anyone have any questions about the actual implementation of Kindle newspapers? Nothing like actual facts to base a discussion off of!
... it just smells funny.
So the issue is that the reader has to choose which news are most important to him?
Seriously?
There is no problem at all. (Either in the specific issue of newspapers, or in the general free market theory you mention).
I see it as the natural evolution of services. A limited news disseminating tool is replaced by another much less limited one.
All business models will eventually be replaced with a better model.
They call us sheeple, I wonder why?
As I have pointed out here and elsewhere, newspapers do not make their money from selling copies; they make it on classifieds and advertising.
All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
This is going to turn into another one of those discussions where people who read Slashdot and other tech sites forget that they are amongst a minority of computer users and subsequently the consensus that is reached here won't reflect reality at all.
And most irritating of all, sometimes the source being linked to wants you to register / login and possibly pay for subscription. I'm not against subscribing in order to pay for the effort, but I'm not going to pay subscription to every news site that Google News links to.
And besides, a local newspaper provides you local-interest stories that can be important to know, in addition to the same kind of news that Google News collects.
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At a certain distance Slashdot shares many important characteristics of a newspaper. There is the equivalent of an editorial board that prioritizes, categorizes and rejects various stories. There is a shared experience with other readers, and there is feedback.
Certainly /. is more feedback centred than a traditional newspaper, but if you browse at +5, not so much.
I look at google news to see what is going on; but I read the globe-and-mail and Toronto Star because I am interested in their perspective.
It's just pineing for the fjords!!
Wo... Wor... Work? What is this "work" of which you speak?
In Portland, Oregon, we have the Ore-groan-ian, also known as the Bore-gonian, also known as the Whore-gonian for its ads that try to take advantage of people.
Newspapers do badly not just because they kill trees to communicate, but because they think only of advertising money. George W. Bush was wonderful until it became more profitable to discuss his destructiveness toward the country. Abusers eventually lose; in this case it has taken a long time.
Newspapers also do badly because, by the time you see the newspaper, you have already read the same story on Google News.
Another reason is that, while you are commuting, you can possibly find enough Wi-Fi to read Google News on your laptop.
Another reason is that the newspaper carries only enough of the story to fit between the ads. They ABSOLUTELY do not care about educating you about the story. They care ONLY about their ad revenue. Did I mention that?
All only my opinion, of course.
Making copies of the song is very cheap; all the cost is in the production. Problem with newspapers is that they can't copyright the news. We "discovered" this "idea of what happened yesterday" first, so therefore, if you want to learn about it, you must buy our newspaper. Capitalism :(. One possible life saver for most of the newspapers is the local news, ie the new sheriff in town. But as people start living in the internet more, they may even stop caring about who the new sheriff is.
This whole discussion suggests two dimensional thinking. Newspapers???
L.A. times subscription- $156 a year. Big-Size Kindle - $500. Think I'll stick with the dead trees for now. By the time the Kindle has paid for itself, there will be a dozen newer, better, cheaper models.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I am sorry, but the mindset of the /. reader only really works for a very small number of people. Death of newspapers? Only when everyone just plain stops reading, period.
All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.
Not really, it's central to their problem. You would be absolutely correct to say that news stories are not the product for a newspaper. Neither is advertisement space though, not completely. The product is the eyes of readers on that ad space. The more eyes they have the more valuable the ad space, and the more they can charge for classifieds and advertisements.
If bloggers can produce a similar quality product to newsprint articles and can put more eyes on the ad-space or provide the same number of eyes for less money, advertisers will start choosing bloggers instead of newspapers. This devalues the adspace, which means they cannot sell the space for as much, and they lose money.
Therefore, maintaining the perception (true or not, I personally think it is valid but not universaly true) that trained journalists offer more reliable high quality news than "amature" bloggers is of critical importance. It's not a sideshow, it is the core of their business model, and without it newspapers are little more than penny-saver ad periodicals.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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means that the reader won't be able to fully appreciate the print experience that is The Sun (Soaraway) or the National Enquirer to name but two beacons of modern journalism.
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Actually there's a Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, that's released on the iRex illiad which has a very nice layout for the newspaper instead of the ugly lists we see on the Kindle.
Newspapers, by contrast, opine on the importance of the day's news using easy-to-understand design conventions -- important stories appear on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines.
But who decides what is most important? The newspapers. The design is a reflection of what the people who run the newspaper deem most important.
A newspaper is only better if you agree with the choices the designer has made in leading you to read certain things. Design is just a tool, and like all tools can be misused to the detriment of the work.
The kindle then may actually be a better delivery system for an average reader because it strips away a layer of bias by flattening design, allowing the user easier flow into stories they actually want to read.
The optimal thing would be a combination of the two approaches where some kind of AI lays out a virtual newspaper on your kindle, using the same design techniques to highlight stories you are most likely interested in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So just because the kindle does a shitty job of delivering news, everyone assumes newspapers still have life in them? Who cares. Most people already get their news online, with or without the kindle. The newspaper business will stick around, for sure, but the age of big newspaper profits are slowly dying. Just a matter of time.
This seems to be working:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html
-- thinkyhead software and media
Internet: You'll be stone dead in a minute.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I read the Kindle DRM article the other day and that further cemented my opinion against it. The guy should return his Kindle. The Kindle is all about making money for Jeffy B., not revolutionizing the printed word for people.
http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/19/kindles-drm-rears-its-ugly-head-and-it-is-ugly/
paper companies grow trees for the purpose of making paper, they are not cutting trees in the wild.
L.A. = Expensive place to live and job isn't stable so not worth moving closer until things are stable. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Another reason is that, while you are commuting, you can possibly find enough Wi-Fi to read Google News on your laptop.
So i am going to have my laptop on my passenger seat while I drive 45 minutes to work?
That reason might work if you have some sort of public transportation and are not the one driving, but its not as easy as reading the paper while you get stuff together in the morning or some such.
Personally I use my media center in the morning and put Google News up on my TV to at least know the headlines to see if I want to check them fully later.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Until Netcraft confirms it I won't believe it either.
"With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost."
I think you stated the solution as a negative fact. Newspapers can be local. In fact, they need to be local, because local is a value they can add to the equation. They can still gather and arrange facts better than anybody, and they can still get access and sell the product of that access. People will still pay for that.
What they can't do is all compete as national/international publications anymore. They could do that when there were only a few choices, first, the two or three local big papers, and later the one big local paper and the national papers flown or satellited in: NY Times, USA Today, etc. So Muncie or Syracuse could have a national/international publication with what they did supplemented by the news services.
The internet kills that by putting all those pseudo-national publications in the same market, and there's just not a market for that many national papers. And the Muncies and Syracuses can't compete with the NY Times and the Washington Post at the national and international level.
The market I think we need to look at is magazines. The old truism was that there was a market for three major publications on any subject: Road & Track, Car & Driver and Motor Trend. Usually there were two biggies and a third guy trailing and doing things differently. After the big three you went niche: magazines dedicated to Porsches, local or regional mags, British roadsters, muscle cars, etc. They all did fine, but they didn't challenge the big guys.
So if that's the model we're headed for, you'll get your big three -- NY Times, Washington Post and one other one, take your pick from a half dozen -- and a bunch of niche papers: Wall Street Journal, papers smart enough to be very local, maybe a Kansas City paper or a Mountain states paper for their regions, that kind of thing. I can envision a tier, actually: your local paper that will sit through the town hall meetings and catch the locals in graft and corruption; the state or regional paper that has resources the locals don't and knows its area better and will cover grain prices or water rights issues, and has access the NY Times doesn't and doesn't want to provide; and a national paper.
They just need to figure out a model quickly and kick the bean counters the hell out of the office suites. In gradual school I read a study about the second papers in major cities and how they died. In every case they weren't making enough money, so they cut staff and/or pages (or color, or paper quality, whatever) to protect the profit margin. The readers noticed they were getting less value and defected, which made advertisers go and/or rates drop, and so the papers made cuts to protect the profit margin. It was a death cycle that they didn't figure out and eventually the big paper in town bought them out. The exception that proved the rule was one paper run by the heir to the family tradition who said to hell with it and added reporters. The readers noticed and sales went up and that paper ended up devouring the one that had been bigger. But bean counters will never get it. It's what they did to GM (cut costs and therefore quality to increase margins and be amazed when nobody wants to buy your cars). You see it day after day in corporate America. Bean counters don't know what you do, they don't know quality when they see it, but they can count and they know everyone in business is supposed to bow to the great god of profit.
It's not that I'm against profit, but you've got to make money doing a good job at what you do. If the recurring financial bubble fiascoes teach us anything, it should be that bankers, accountants and these all-purpose managers aren't the answer to anything in particular, even banks.
There is a reason the press is considered the fourth estate . They serve a role in our society that bloggers and news consolidators do not yet fulfill. Think of the various investigative reports and whistleblower services each good local paper provides. These checks on the system only work when the published report is widely read and available (to be picked up by TV and national media), which is not the case for electronic systems. I think no electronic location has mindshare enough, and generates enough cash to support the staff for this function. In my area all the best reporters have been laid off during the recession and are showing up on a good blog MinnPost. But they can't find a business model or audience (although you can donate to them to help as I have done). But very few of the readers of the papers know that MinnPost exists, it took me quite a bit of time myself. My plea is to consider what happens along these lines when the audience is fragmented to many many blogs with a niche perspective or audience. As an example, Michelle Bachman is my congresswoman and without the papers her silliness would go unnoticed - ironically I am going to link a blog so you can see what I mean, but these all came out in the papers for the entire district to see. The press may be the only think keeping her from the deep end.
BTW the largest electronic readership web site is that of the paper, but without the print edition I am not sure the online edition would survive long.
Circulations are still healthy for most newspapers. Many small newspapers publish content only of interest to locals and they get those eyeballs because of it.
But eyeballs do you no good if a) Craigslist sucks the money out of classifieds and b) online advertising rates continue to plunge like a chunk of lead, making a shift to online news worthless.
There's more to it than that, but as I said: it's about money.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
There are many advantages to buying an actual, printed newspaper. There is nothing like an old newspaper to light a fire or for polishing windows, and of course, you can take it with you to the loo and read it or use it when the loo-paper has run out; I challenge anybody to do that with their netbook or iPhone.
Speaking of the Gate Keeper, that reminds me of an insightful quote:
Print is dead.
-Dr. Egon Spengler 1984
Debates over the "feel of paper" or "convenience of electronic delivery" aside, and assuming you could live with either, the economics are interesting. If you're committed to getting the paper, even the very expensive Kindle DX pays for itself in about a year (plus or minus). The difference, of course, is the paper delivery bleeds you a little week-by-week so you don't notice it. The Kindle DX is a big purchase outlay of nearly $500 to get started. But, again, after about a year things are close to break-even, depending on your usage. (Note this assumes home delivery prices won't go up!)
Here are the numbers for delivery in my area:
New York Times Home Delivery (paper)
14.80 (per week) Daily (769.60 yearly)
10.40 (per week) "Weekender" Fri-Sun (540.80 yearly)
7.50 (per week) Sunday only (390.00 yearly)
7.40 (per week) Weekdays Mon-Fri (384.80 yearly)
Kindle Daily Edition $13.99/mo (167.88 yearly)
Year of NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $656.88 (vs $769.60 for paper)
Sunday single issue NYT ($0.75/wk) $39
Year of Sunday NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $528 (vs $390 for paper)
Two years of Sunday NYT + Kindle DX = $567 (vs $780 for paper)
Boston Globe Home Delivery (paper)
9.00 (per week) Daily (468.00 yearly)
9.99 (per month) Boston Globe Kindle Edition ($119.88 yearly)
Year of the Globe + 468.00 Kindle DX = $608.88 (vs $468.00 for paper)
Two years of the Globe + Kindle DX = $728.76 (vs $936.00 for paper)
The funny thing is the Boston Globe probably loses money on the $9.00/week paper subscription but makes good profits on the 33-cents per day Kindle edition. If true, electronic delivery of the paper might be the only thing that could save it. Imagine that...
I don't need an editor to "tell" me what news is important to me. Sheesh, does anyone remember the New York Times burying the article on the Nazi death camps on page 8? The front page is not the most important news, ever. It is the most sellable news, which by definition is almost always the least important.
Cranky educator.